RFID tags made to store product jingles

When you buy something at the shops, would you want to hear an advertising jingle for the product ring out across the store as the cashier scans your purchase? Florian Wesch, a computer science student from Durlach in Germany, has worked out a way to store a tune on the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags now attached to most goods. To squeeze a jingle onto a tag’s 1-kilobyte memory, Wesch used the compressed music format employed by the Commodore 64 home computer of the 1980s. When the tag is scanned at the checkout, it would send the tune to be played…